theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Biografhy J 3
that a woman could not have written Wuthering Heights and
that the brother, Patrick, must have been the real author. 10
This is the type of argument which has led people to argue that
Shakespeare must have visited Italy, must have been a lawyer,
a soldier, a teacher, a farmer. Ellen Terry gave the crushing
reply to all this when she argued that, by the same criteria,
Shakespeare must have been a woman.
But, it will be said, such instances of pretentious folly do not
dispose of the problem of personality in literature. We read
Dante or Goethe or Tolstoy and know that there is a person
behind the work. There is an indubitable physiognomical similarity
between the writings of one author. The question might
be asked, however, whether it would not be better to distinguish
sharply between the empirical person and the work, which can
be called "personal" only in a metaphorical sense. There is a
quality which we may call "Miltonic" or "Keatsian" in the work
of their authors. But this quality can be determined on the basis
of the works themselves, while it may not be ascertainable upon
purely biographical evidence. We know what is "Virgilian" or
"Shakespearian" without having any really definite biographical
knowledge of the two great poets.
Still, there are connecting links, parallelisms, oblique resem-
blances, topsy-turvy mirrors. The poet's work may be a mask,
a dramatized conventionalization, but it is frequently a conven-
tionalization of his own experiences, his own life. If used with a
sense of these distinctions, there is use in biographical study.
First, no doubt, it has exegetical value: it may explain a great
many allusions or even words in an author's work. The bio-
graphical framework will also help us in studying the most ob-
vious of all strictly developmental problems in the history of
literature—the growth, maturing, and possible decline of an
author's art. Biography also accumulates the materials for other
questions of literary history such as the reading of the poet, his
personal associations with literary men, his travels, the landscape
and cities he saw and lived in: all of them questions which
may throw light on literary history, i.e., the tradition in which
the poet was placed, the influences by which he was shaped, the
materials on which he drew.
Whatever the importance of biography in these respects, how-